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Aria Razfar, PhD

Professor

Aria Razfar coordinates the Project ELMSA grant, preparing Chicago-area teachers to deliver culturally relevant instruction, while his personal research interests focus on the sociocultural dimensions of language and its meaning to human development.

Education

Research & Teaching Interests

Razfar's research interests are grounded in sociocultural theories of language, learning, and human development. In particular, he draws on linguistic anthropological perspectives such as language socialization and language ideologies for the purposes of understanding learning and development in urban schools. He teaches courses in the Bilingual/ESL program as well as doctoral courses in Language, Literacy, and Culture. Dr. Razfar's work is anchored in communities whose language practices have been historically marginalized in many formal and official spaces of society; thus, there is an explicit social justice character to his research. He currently serves as a principal investigator or co-PI on several nationally funded grants aimed at improving teaching and learning for English Language Learners in urban contexts.

Vomvoridi-Ivanović, E., & Razfar, A. (2013). In the shoes of English language learners: Helping educators understand some complexities of language in mathematics instructio through a baseball activity. Journal of Teaching for Excellence and Equity in Mathematics, 5 (1), 7-15.

Razfar, A. (2011). The linguistic re-turn: The moral and practical imperative of “language” in curriculum studies. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, 7(2), 1-37.